Best Book of Week 10!

Belinda Bauer was another of my discoveries last year as a new writer of dark, psychologically complex novels. Blacklands is not so much a mystery as a thriller.

Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb’s uncle Billy was murdered as a child by a serial killer, and his grandmother has never gotten over it. Steven’s Nan spends all day looking out the window for her son, whose body was never found. Everyone thinks Billy was murdered by pedophile Arnold Avery, who is serving a life sentence.

Steven decides he will find his uncle’s body and that will fix his family, so he has spent all of his spare time for three years digging up the moor near his house where Avery’s victims were found. Finally he realizes the task is hopeless.

Steven feels that he is so average that he has no talents, so he is pleased when his teacher tells him he writes a good letter. He decides that maybe if he writes to the murderer, Avery will tell him where he buried Uncle Billy.

When Avery realizes that the person who has been writing to him is a boy, he decides that the situation is too delicious and he must escape from prison. Of course, he is successful.

The barren moors of Exmoor are so vividly described that they are almost a character in this chilling, suspenseful novel. At times I wasn’t totally convinced by the depiction of the thinking of the serial killer, but for the most part I was absolutely riveted.